The Cisco Nexus 9396TX is a dense, line-rate 10GBase-T switch. It delivers comprehensive line-rate Layer 2 and Layer 3 overlays and the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) feature set. It is ideal for top-of-rack deployments in both traditional and ACI-enabled enterprise, service provider, and cloud environments.



The Cisco Nexus 9396TX Switch has 48 10GBase-T ports that can operate at 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 10 Gbps speeds and 12 Quad Small Form Pluggable Plus (QSFP+) uplinks. All the ports are line rate, delivering 1.92 Tbps of throughput in a 2-rack-unit (2RU) form factor. The switch can be deployed as an access switch in traditional three-tier designs or as a leaf node in spine-leaf architectures.



ACI Support

- Integrated multi-hypervisor and bare-metal interoperation with VLAN and VxLAN routing and bridging support in ACI mode

- Single view of the entire fabric on APIC dashboard

- Full normalization of any encapsulation inside the fabric

- Consistent policy-based approach to deploying applications on top of the ACI fabric

- Fabric supports seamless integration of layer 4 (physical and virual) services in the end-to-end ACI policy framework

- Cohesive alignment of policies as workload moves around inside the fabric



Programmability

- Open APIs to manage the switch through remote-procedure calls (JavaScript Object Notation or XML) over HTTP or HTTPS

- Automated configuration through Linux shell scripts

- Support for customer applications through a Linux container environment



High Availability

- Hot-swappable, redundant power supplies and fan trays

- Full patching support



Energy Efficiency

- Power supplies that are rated at 80 Plus Platinum

- Support for front-to-back or back-to-front airflow configuration



Investment Protection

- 40 Gb bidirectional transceiver for reuse of existing 10 Gigabit Ethernet multimode cabling plant for 40 Gigabit Ethernet

- Support for Cisco NX-OS and ACI modes of operation